Long before I became pregnant, I would ask people how they knew that they wanted to have children. Was there a lightning moment, or had the longing grown and grown until it became too much to ignore? Of course, the answers I got were as varied as people themselves. Some were able to distill it into a clear instant: taking hold of a small child’s hand for the first time, or seeing a baby on a bus one day and knowing, suddenly. Others were influenced by life events: the death of a parent was a common one, leading them to reflect on how bloodlines unfurl, wanting to see a little of that beloved parent manifest in a new being. Others had always known, in their bones, since their own childhoods.
Then, for women, there was the so-called biological clock. Not so much a desire for a child, but an awareness that time could be running out, and a sort of not-wanting, a double negative: not-wanting to have not had a child. Many of these women expressed guilt at not having felt “the longing”, as though an innate-seeming, visceral dose of baby fever was the norm, and, in their absence of strong maternal feelings, they were deviating from it. But it does not seem that way to me, and besides, my own feelings were far from simple. At times it felt as though my body was at war with my brain. There were so many rational reasons not to become a parent, and yet the longing I felt was so powerful that it was making me unspeakably sad not to be.
I say “body”, but of course I don’t know. I can write only of how it felt, but scientifically, the jury remains out on whether the desire for parenthood is down to nature or nurture, and both biology and culture are likely to contribute. We are social animals, and social pressure can be enormous. I like to think that I was immune to this, though during 2020-21 it felt as though everyone I knew was having a baby, except me. I sat on the sidelines, wanting it, but dithering.
It is, of course, a privilege to dither. Before the advent of contraception, becoming a parent couldn’t really be described as a decision at all. Perhaps this is why my search for historical sources that showed women interrogating the question was rather fruitless. Even speaking to women of older generations, who came of age post-contraception, there’s a sense that there wasn’t much thought given to the question. “It’s just what you did”, is a sentence that came up, time and time again, and several older women have expressed their admiration for my generation for taking the prospect so seriously.
Role models are also a factor. My mother has quite a few friends who are child-free, and so I never grew up believing that motherhood was destiny. I knew that there were many kinds of life that one could have, and also that I could have a relationship with children in other ways: as an aunt, a godparent, a friend. In fact, I found that the decision to be child-free was far better documented than the decision to become a parent. It feels as though there is still a taboo when it comes to expressing having had entirely rational doubts about becoming a parent, only to go ahead and take the plunge. I have lost count of the number of times that I have read that you should only do so if you are “100% sure”. As someone who, for a variety of reasons, has never been 100% sure about anything in my life, that feels pretty shaming.
It feels to me as though we need more open conversations about the decision-making process, and better ways of supporting people who are in the midst of it. We are surrounded by panic about the birthrate – for the first time in history, half the women in England and Wales have not had a child by the time they reach 30, yet there still seems to be little exploration of the fact that many western countries are what could be termed hostile environments for new parents. There are many reasons – economic, educational, environmental – why a person may delay parenthood, and my generation and those younger than it face unprecedented hardships. On top of that, there is evidence to suggest that women are happier without children and a spouse. When a happiness expert spoke about this in 2019, people were enraged, but the fact remains that the sexist balance of domestic labour makes a lot of women miserable, and who can blame them for choosing another path?
As with anything to do with parenthood, we could do with less judgment, and more listening. And perhaps, as Sheila Heti suggests in Motherhood, the constant questioning is all “a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties – when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience – from doing anything useful with them at all”.
What’s working: Even though I decided motherhood was for me, I found the 2015 essay collection Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids fascinating, especially as it included men, one of whom (Geoff Dyer), as the New York Times reviewer pointed out, shows “what it looks like to have a relationship to the topic that is completely unburdened by guilt or self-doubt”.
What isn’t: I find myself hating the tone of a lot of pregnancy books targeted at women, which feel infantilising and identity-sapping. I dislike being referred to as a disembodied “mum”, and language such as “lady garden” and “sore parts” makes me want to scream. As for some of the advice, a section on the idea of “freedom Friday” – which sees a husband deign to give his wife one “night off” a week, followed by “top tips on how not to hate your partner” made me wonder if I had entered a wormhole straight to the 1950s. Sadly, barbiturates were not suggested as a remedy.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
